Bitcoin has faced criticism for its slow transaction speed. Especially POS systems such as Paypal, Vend, and most notably Square Register. Of course, this makes it harder for cryptocurrency lovers get a little utility out of their coins, which is already hard in a sea of brokerage promotions, ultra-competitive ICOs, and so on.  

Those POS systems are committed to diversifying their payment options for customers. The other incentive is helping restaurants widen their clientele to ensure Bitcoin users have an equal opportunity of payment access as conventional customer purchases.

However, a counterpart of the POS systems supporting bitcoin, Stripe, was on board like everyone else until the company encountered technical issues with the currency that conflicted with their primary interests for supporting its use.

Stripe cites Bitcoin’s reach of block size limits, shifting the currency into becoming more of an asset as opposed to a means of exchange has made it less useful for payments. There is currently a scaling issue to which 1 megabyte of transactions can be processed at any one time, leading to delays.

According to Blockchain.com, it takes an average time of 78 minutes to confirm a bitcoin transaction. Slow speed in transactions and confirmation time has led to an increase in the failure rate of transactions.

To address this issue, the Blockchain supporting bitcoin divided itself into two. The direction of the digital asset was to set up an alternative node called Bitcoin ABC. The user activated hard fork to place, providing all Bitcoin investors with an entirely new asset called Bitcoin Cash.

In order to validate and relay transactions, bitcoin requires more than a network of miners processing transactions, it must broadcast messages across a network using nodes. This is the first step in the transaction process that results in a block confirmation.  

While nodes are required to send messages across the bitcoin network, the alternative node, Bitcoin ABC, causes the blockchain (the digital ledger which records every bitcoin transaction) to fork and create two separate digital assets: the original bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash.